“The Cold War, really ended? – Decolonizing the unfinished American imperialism in Korean education reforms”

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Education in the Era of Interconnectedness and Complexities.

Proposal

The commonsense of the Cold War is that the War ended in 1991 when the geopolitical tension between the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc dissolved. Yet, its legacy continues today, particularly in the Korean peninsula, which has been one of the international battlefields since WWII (or, even earlier). The end of WWII in 1945 meant the end of the Japanese colonial government in Korea; however, the construction of South Korea as a nation-state was immediately led by the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) between 1945-1948, which also established the modern educational system (Kim, 1988). South Korea, which was a dynasty before Japanese colonization (1910-1945) and previously refused to adopt “Western” thinking, established its foundation of a national education system based on the American notion of democracy and progressive education, which continues today. This paper historicizes the “national” education system in South Korea by examining how the “colonial modernity” (Barlow, 2012) has gradually become the “modernized coloniality” – both willingly and unknowingly – that reproduce and reestablish the educational reform discourses in South Korea. Hongik Ingan [홍익인간; 弘益人間], the official principle of education in South Korea indicating “to broadly benefit the human world”, was established under the USAMGIK, adopting the American democratic vision of citizenship (Ministry of Education, 2022). This study takes this notion of Hongik Ingan as a flashpoint to explore how the American notion of enlightened citizenship has been integrated and transmogrified through the assemblages of the Neo-Confucious thinking that is particular in the Korean contexts (Author, 2012). Specifically, this study questions how the official vision of education, which appears the Korean and has rarely changed despite the decades of educational reforms, to make the “democratic citizen under the humanitarian ideal” (Ministry of Education, 2022) is based on the colonial modernity that the West imposed a “universal” model of modernity on the ways of thinking about the education and the society through American imperialism and colonial governance (Bhambra, 2014). Drawing on reform documents, research literature, and newspapers, the study highlights the previously unseen layers of constructing the “Korean” national education system and reform to challenge what is taken for granted in the humanitarian ideal in education. Tracing roots and lineages of ideas and practices that make the “Korean” education reforms in this way, the study makes intelligible the unspoken but operationally powerful and colonized norms, as a first step to “de-westernize” (Iwabuchi, 2014) the contemporary discourses of education in South Korea. Through this, the study provides broader implications to consider historical contingencies in international and comparative education research today.

Author

• Sun Young Lee, Wichita State University